Ecce Homo: Pictures at the Exhibition

The modern expression of the human form grew increasingly varied in the 19th century with the advent of photography and the rise of painters’ attempts to capture the inner life of their models. In the 20th century, artists imbued images of people with their own sense of introspection, resulting in a variety of new developments. In this exhibition, drawn primarily from the museum collection, we present over 100 works dealing with the human image from the late 20th century by approximately 50 artists, including everyone from Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet to Yasumasa Morimura and the duo of Sun Yuan & Peng Yu.

The exhibition started January 16th (today here, but yesterday in Japan). I’ve been sent a picture of the poster (below). The web site features 9 pictures from the exhibition (including my photograph of Tracy Blackstone and Debbie Notkin in this poster).

Ecce Homo poster

Yuki Onodera is a Japanese-born photographer who lives and works in Paris. “She acquired the second-hand clothes at Christian Boltanski’s 1993 Paris exhibition “Dispersion”. Boltanski had created a large heap of used clothing, and visitors to the exhibition were allowed to take a bag of clothes home for the fee of ten francs. Onodera did just that, and then mounted each of the pieces of clothing, symbolic of death in Boltanski’s work, thereby symbolically restoring them to individual life and capturing them as bodiless portraits.”

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Portrait of Second-Hand Clothing No. 52

This sculpture by Marc Quinn is made of polymer and freeze-dried animal blood: “the co-existence of innocence and corruption in the world.” Quinn has used not only conventional sculpture material, but also blood, ice and faeces; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments. Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life—spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual.(Wickipedia)

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Ken Kitano‘s image superimposes 38 photographs of Indonesian women, as part of his “Our Face” series. Kitano, who lives in Tokyo has been working on the series since 1999. The project is profoundly influenced by August Sander, who is an influence on my work as well.

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Kikuji Yamashita served in the Japanese Army in China. “Memories of what he saw and did as a soldier there, including killing a Chinese prisoner, pervaded his ferocious postwar artistic vision and output.” “The Tale of Akebono Village” is a famous surreal oil painting depicting a struggle between Japanese peasants and a greedy landlord.

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The Tale of Akebono Village

I’ll post more about the whole exhibition when I receive the catalogue and have a fuller sense of the show. What I’ve seen so far is really interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing all of it and reading the curators’ discussions.